Mock Draft Roundup: The Leafs’ first round selections

The season’s over, and the draft is just eight business days away. We’ve been digging into the numbers, video, everything in the last month or so in order to get ourselves ready for it, but we know the actual selections won’t fall perfectly in line with our rankings or anyone else’s.

There are team needs to consider, and mistakes to be made. With that in mind, each year many around the internet try to nail down their version of a mock draft, and we checked in on how they see things shaking out for the Leafs in that first round.

Here’s a collection of mock drafts from some of the more trusted sources around the internet, with the players predicted to go in the Leafs’ two slots – fourth and twenty-fourth overall. [Of course the team could blow the doors off with a series of trades to make this list quickly obsolete, but hey, we’ll go with what we have.]

As for that fourth overall pick, it’s mostly just the usual suspects, except for Cox’s draft which has the Leafs going a little off the board for Provorov. In my opinion, the Leafs would be well off to explore dealing this pick to move down and grab him, accumulating an additional asset in the process, but I suppose that depends on what’s even open to them in trade talks. If they believe the opportunity to deal down – and seventh is perhaps the furthest they can go and still hope to nab him – isn’t there, they might be forced into a big decision between Provorov and Hanifin (who also only shows up once for the Leafs in this list) at four, assuming they’re dead set on a defenceman.

“Otherwise, the Strome vs. Marner debate rolls on, with Strome edging his counterpart by showing up four times in this list. Oh, my nerves.”

Just to nitpick a little bit….

It looks like just about every site (I can’t see McKeens list) that doesn’t have the Leafs taking Strome have him going 3rd overall to the Coyotes. I think we can say, at least when it comes to these rankings, there is no debate; Strome is the better prospect and the only situation in which he doesn’t end up a Leaf is if the Coyotes draft him.

I think Strome is ranked 3rd out of the trio of Marner, Hanifin and Strome (though all of them are very close to each other), but the only reason why he’s being picked 3rd the most is because the Coyotes are in need of a big centre, and have been linked to strome for a while.